It’s been a weird-ish sorta week. Many emotional roller coasters. Some (but not all) of which include:

Firstly, my Sam had one-hundred and ten pounds worth of weights fall on his fingers, mildly injuring their tips. He said, “I was all, ‘Um, Guys? And then I just sort of yanked them out of there before they got to hurting too bad.” I said, “Please NEVER DO THAT AGAIN, foolson, because your hand might’ve decided on impulse to leave your fingers where they sat!” There is a slight fracture to his birdfinger, but that hasn’t slowed down the picking any. Yesterday (AND the day before) found him in my room, perched on a chair, asking if we could do some playing. Busy with ten kinds of things, I struck a compromise wherein he played and I sang (sung. singeded?). It is not at all strange to wrap a basket for a baby shower (aside: Methodist baby shower invite? DO NOT RSVP WITH ‘YES’. You are welcome.) while busting out some Leonard Cohen with your kid.

So, you know, thank God. I don’t know why Sam is lifting, anyway. Doesn’t the boy know that rock stars are supposed to be skinny and rangey and concerned with only the chasing of the muse and also the skirt? Three of his fingertips look a frightful mess, but they give him street cred, I reckon. It’s better than that damn shiner he took last month while ’sparring’. You know, three days before his senior portraits were to be shot.

One of Scout’s good friends lost a parent to suicide last week. A week ago today, as a matter of fact. Some of you may recall that I tweeted about writing a particular date over and over mistakenly on paperwork, because it did not feel like an accident that it happened to be occurring again and again and again. Come the nineteenth I was wondering like crazy what the twentieth would bring and I got the news early on the twenty-first: Em’s mother shot herself while in her office the night previous.

I’ve yet to see the true fallout from this with my daughter, but I am pretty convinced that it is coming; Scouty has this immense fear of death and an even bigger one that I will up and disappear. Each and every time I’m set to go on a trip that does not include her, anything consisting of two days or more, she is right up under my hind end for the seventy-two hours prior. I may write more about this one day. I may not. These things are so finely-drawn and difficult to manage.

Mathias was laid up for a solid four days with some sort of fevery yuck that made him appear more gaunt and pale than usual. On his first day back to school there was a field trip to the Space and Rocket Center wherein he netted some astronaut ice cream. One of that child’s most favorite pleasures in life (THANK YOU EVIL NANA) is ice cream. For him to have found it in yet another incarnation was something akin to the holy grail and he has taken great delight in the fact that he can open the pouch, take one bite of this miracle of modern food science and then wrap everything carefully back up until the next night, when another single bite is procured. God only knows how long he will be able to stretch this ritual out before he is sans space-age technofood.

Oh, it is so great being the mother to a weird kid. The ‘one bite per night’ thing is most likely happening because Mathias knows that he was brought forth from the loins of a frugal man and has no chance in hell of talking said man into buying him something as exotic as astronaut ice cream on the regular. Should such a request ever arise, as a matter of fact, my eternally hot and notoriously thrifty spouse would say, “Boy, if you want more of that astronaut ice cream, you damn well better look into becoming an astronaut.”

I guess lately I’ve been mentioning my children more than usual in this here space because the world just feels so unsure these days and it’s one more way to pull them to me, to keep count of who and where we all are. It’s going so fast….there were days when –in the throes of somewhat demanding parental tedium– I could never have imagined that we’d be anything but mommy and children.

Now here we are, a woman and three lovely people she’s mostly raised, and it’s a thing filled with equal parts exhilaration and utter dismay. I miss their tiny little hands patting my face and their never-ending stream of toddler giggles, but my God it’s nice to sleep late on Saturday mornings when my too-busy head allows such things.

I cannot imagine what I’m going to feel like when mine get bigger. I’m already freaking out about jr high next year…ugh…

Jettomatika10.27.2009

CIII: He thinks it’s wildly cool to be able to shove it in his desk drawer (blatantly breaking the ‘no food in your rooms, evAR’ rule) and still find it there, unsullied, the next day.

Troutie: I used to have these crazy glimpses –the way a foot moved, the glint of sunlight off a face– of who they’d be in several years. Turns out, those little moments were startlingly accurate. Rare, but accurate indeed. Look for them and you’ll see what I mean.

StilettoMomma: The bulk of the romance for me was from about two until around eight. There is something loaded with crazy magicks during that time span. But the flipside of that is that it sincerely is so very cool to see them come into their own as people independent of you, and how they relate back to you from this place of spiritual and emotional maturity.

Life is just a series of trade-offs. I deeply love every minute of sweet toddlerhood I enjoy right now, and dread losing these days — but sleeping past 7:00 on a Saturday morning sounds mighty nice too. Guess the trick is to learn to love what you’ve got, and try not to look too far ahead or behind.